 Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for a full day of rich panels and discussion. Thanks, most of all, to our panelists who are scattered throughout the room and who have traveled from across the country and world to contribute to a critical examination of zoning's role in shaping our cities and planning practices. Just a few notes of logistics to get out of the way. In terms of Q&A today, we will be collecting index cards at the beginning of the discussion section, so please find those in your programs and think about your burning questions while the presentations are happening. Lunch will also follow today's first panel, and we invite you all to join us at the back of Wood Auditorium. So this conference actually springs from a discussion in Professor Emeritus now, Elliot Sklar's Planning History Seminar a few years ago. Elliot has an intellectual predisposition for lending contemporary relevance to critical planning theories, and he flagged the forthcoming zoning centennial a few years back. With Elliot, we started a series of discussions that made us quickly realize that zoning's reach spans the occasionally disparate range of substantive topics that we study, from housing to land use to transit. These many dialogues, paired with tireless substantive and administrative efforts by our colleagues in the Urban Planning PhD program, have culminated in today's events. We would particularly like to thank Lauren Fisher, who launched the initial ideas for the conference today. Deepa Mehta, who took the lead on the second panel today and has taken charge of AV efforts for the day. Kathy Bae, who is still tirelessly working on promotion, sitting outside managing the table. She championed outreach for today and last night's event at the museum. And Eric Goldwyn, who coordinated our efforts with the Museum of the City of New York. Thank you all. So as planners and practitioners in the built environment in GSAP, we see our work as explicitly engaging with values and interventions. And with the exception of the discussions that generated this conference, frankly, zoning was de-emphasized in our master's programs, not just at Columbia. I went to MIT, for example. Around us in Europe, we saw it as an antiquated and frankly mundane tool, a technical remnant of 1950s that was the domain of lower level beer carts and cubicles looking at their maps. And in part due to this attitude, many of our classmates and us overlooked zoning's potential to promote inclusive and productive outcomes, the power to influence the form, function and even social relations within cities. So the centennial of the ordinance has prompted us to take stock of zoning's role in the issues that planning school and GSAP has taught us to care about the most and note the potential of zoning. So for instance, zoning is a tool that has been and continues to be implemented to impose singular uses and racially and ethically segregate cities, which thwarts both physical and social diversity. Zoning's role in social exclusion is the topic of our first panel today. As our second panel will show, it has also been used as a regulatory force that has been circumvented or co-opted for political ends or to promote economic gains for private actors. Yet as our last panel will demonstrate, planners today are framing zoning as a potential engine for the public welfare through incentivizing affordable housing, for example, in a political environment that increasingly hinges on private investment. So from the rich discussions that took place, it really was a series of really rich discussions. It was a privilege to be part of it, developing the conference. We have three goals for the conference. First, we want to establish zoning firmly as an object of study at the heart of planning, both in the practice of day-to-day actions and our scholarship. Second, we need to do so with a critical understanding of zoning's past and present as a tool of exclusion. And also that the bigger picture that zoning is important and has so much status today, in part because many of the other mechanisms for planning have become relatively weak and defunded or have less power now. Thirdly, we hope that this conference kicks off an agenda to more publicly reevaluate and reposition zoning as a powerful tool for planning that can be used to advance, as we keep saying, inclusion. Nonetheless, today's panel should also highlight how zoning is indeed as much a political force as it is a technical one. And a month ago today, we collectively woke up to an unsettling national political reality, as everyone here quite knows. And while the reach of the Trump administration and that of other recent isolationist policies and victories globally will inevitably influence a breadth of policies with which many of us are concerned, the devalorization of urban programs is really nothing new to most contemporary planners. As the welfare state of the mid-20th century continues to wane, the fixity of zoning and land use as squarely within the planners domain remains one certainty in this increasingly uncertain political climate. It is more important than ever for planners to harness the power aligned with zoning and similar tools when and where we can for the promotion of the public good. Again, we hope this is just the beginning of a larger continued project. Personally, we know we'll be engaged, along with Lauren Fisher. We're currently completing a paper on the geography's zoning variances and exceptions. In New York City, we just presented at ACSP. And so we're intellectually committed in making sure that the discussions around critical approaches to zoning continue. We hope that you and the other panelists and all of you in the audience will join us in this effort. We, lastly, perhaps most importantly, we need to simultaneously thank and introduce our wonderful dean, Amal Andrao, who's shown a commitment to this project since its inception and had the foresight to see the potential sexiness inside of what we all didn't maybe realize was a great topic beforehand. So without the dean's office generous support also, there's no way that we could have brought you all here to engage with each other on such critical issues. Please welcome our wonderful dean of us. Thank you, Bernadette and Valérie and all the PhD students who've organized this great day. An important conversation. I actually think zoning is quite sexy. But today, of course, we're sort of rethinking zoning on the year of its 100th anniversary. I'm delighted that this day was actually thought about by our students. And with the intent to really bring a kind of cross-disciplinary conversation to bear upon the school, something that I've really tried to foster and support, but also engage New York within the larger context of our still global world, despite our president elects kind of thoughts. And so before introducing, and it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Jerry Caden from Harvard today. I just wanted to say and to kind of follow up on stating that this day really, in this conference, is about rethinking how zoning can be a powerful instrument, which can be enlisted to foster inclusive and productive cities. Since the 1916 ordinance, zoning has been a powerful force in New York that has shaped the visual contours, economic mix, and social patterns of the city. From my practice as an architect, I'm also reminded how zoning can either curtail creativity, but also create opportunities for invention. As it's apogee, zoning was cast as a quintessentially modern, reformist, ideal, and ideal. Indeed, zoning epitomizes the central tenets of modernity, the belief in a state and a one-size-fits-all technocracy that acts as an intervenes for the common good. As a tool, zoning carves light and air into the physical fabric of the city. As a language and a discourse, zoning carries bold aspirations to facilitate our, quote, better natures in the city. But as many of the speakers here observe, however, the truth behind the design of zoning and its adoption had deep roots in anti-interventionist and segregationist forces. And so, as the organizers note, this conference is an opportunity for us today to acknowledge this, quote, dark side of our profession, something we do often, and we need to more than ever continue to do here at the school. And to consider how the actual implementation of zoning has often veered far from its original intent and its plans. As a second panel will explore, critically engaging zoning today provides rich material to understanding not only planning ideas, but also its practice, its possibilities, and its implementation. But beyond self-critique or elegies for zoning, I think it's really important that this conference moves towards the future to reactivate zoning as a kind of critically understood now tool for change. And so positioning zoning at the center of planning, again, in some ways, is an opportunity to recognize the unique tools that the discipline of planning offers to the design and the social sciences. Indeed, as the speakers today will illustrate, planning brings sharp analytical tools to identify the economic, political, technical, value-driven, and spatial mechanisms at work that change cities. Planning is thus well positioned to bring zoning into the future as a tool to make cities more inclusive, more flexible, and more resilient. And so it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Jerry Caden, the Frank Bacchus-Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His teaching and scholarship focus on land use law and environmental law, public-private real estate development, public space in cities, and urban disaster resilience. Dr. Caden is prolific within these wide-spanning areas, within planning, and his contribution to the literature around zoning and land use have shaped the academic conversation for the past several decades. He has advised governments, non-governmental organizations, and private developers around the world. We are honored to have him deliver our keynote today. Please join me in welcoming Professor Caden. Thank you, Amal. OK, thank you very, very much. And it's absolutely terrific to be here at Columbia, which I almost think of as one of my second institutions. Both my father and my sister went to Columbia Law School. I grew up in and around New York. And although I've actually been in Massachusetts, the great majority of my life, I am a Yankees fan. And once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker. 100-year anniversaries are time-honored hooks for celebration and nostalgic reflection. But here we are today for critical analysis and speculation. How should we employ zoning to shape our cities? For better and worse, zoning is the chief technique employed by cities to control the use and development of privately-owned land in the United States. It's also highly used under whatever label it may have outside the United States. And indeed, in fast-growing international cities, officiales regularly inquire about zoning practice, but especially as practiced in the United States. When I give advice to public officials here and abroad, I find it wise and relatively easy to provide examples of failure as well as success. For zoning, this is a particular time of critique. Some criticize zoning for becoming in the hands of its overlords, de facto planning rather than zoning, a burden that is too heavy for zoning and its enactment process to bear. Others criticize zoning for overly constraining development in both city and suburb, thereby driving up prices for land, building, and consumers of the built environment, exclusionary zoning being an example of this. Some criticize zoning for being captive of neighborhood interests to the detriment of city-wide interests. Others criticize zoning for being captive to the real estate industry and business interests. Some criticize, in particular, traditional Euclidean zoning, named after the case that affirmed zoning's basic constitutionality. Proposing form-based codes and traditional neighborhood development ordinances as substitutes. Some criticize zoning for being imposed city by city, town by town, even village by village, rather than regionally or state-wide. And finally, some criticize zoning for becoming too complex, far beyond the reach of the average person. And by the way, I would say far beyond the reach of the average lawyer. How generalizable are these critiques? Are they baked into zoning's DNA? Or are they critiques of how zoning has been applied in different cities? Are there superior regulatory mechanisms to consider that would achieve the goals that society claims for zoning? My presentation this morning is meant to spotlight some of the key ideas and practices surrounding zoning in modern cities here in New York, across the United States, and even around the world. Given the time constraints of my three hours that I have, I will be necessarily selective. And some of your topics may not appear here on my list. It doesn't mean that I don't think they are important, but I have chosen them. Indeed, I've chosen to address six propositions. One has to be nervous for those of you familiar with some recent events in the world of architecture, stating propositions out there can get you in trouble. But that's for those of you who follow the architecture world quite closely. So, without further ado, let me address my first proposition, which is that zoning is not planning. Now, this should not be really a surprise to anyone, although if a Martian came down and looked at cities in the United States and even elsewhere, the Martian may conclude that indeed zoning is exactly that, to be a clear planning. When we criticize zoning, are we criticizing the mechanics of zoning as implementation technique, or are we criticizing the plan or planning that the zoning is trying to implement? Now, this may sound like an academic point. Indeed, an academics point, and of course, I must plead guilty to that, but I don't think it's a minor point. What do we mean when we say San Francisco or Chicago or Tokyo has great or terrible zoning? When we criticize zoning as being too permissive or too restrictive, are we discussing the mechanism of floor area ratios as a means to regulate bulk, or are we criticizing the merits of density and community character in any given location? There's a cottage industry today that claims zoning is the enemy because it prevents development of, for example, housing and thus affordable housing. And I understand that cottage industry and sympathize with it, but such criticism is truly a shorthand for criticizing the substance of ideas that are implemented by zoning rather than truly a critique of zoning itself. So the big issue, is there anything wrong with making zoning planning? 100 years of legal history would strenuously argue yes. If you look back at 1922 and the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, a draft or model law, not a real law but a draft law drafted at the national level by the national government actually under the direction of then Secretary of Commerce, subsequently President Herbert Hoover, that standard act specified that zoning must be quote, in accordance with a comprehensive plan unquote. The subsequent 1927 Standard City Planning Enabling Act called for a quote master plan for the physical development of the territory. New York State has statutory language that requires zoning to be quote, in accord with a well-considered plan. So why have so many argued for a separation and serial application of planning and zoning? And why would the separation be important? I think there are four reasons for that separation. First, planning is more comprehensive than zoning in terms of subject matter, territory, time horizon and implementation mechanisms. Planning addresses, for example, the nature and location of public infrastructure and buildings. The armature of the public realm as well as privately owned land. If you listen to section six of the Standard City Planning Enabling Act, again, this draft law that was encouraged by the national government upon states, it says the following about a city's municipal or master or comprehensive or general plan referring by the way to all of those adjectives. Quote, such plan with the accompanying maps, plots, charts and descriptive matter shall show the planning commission's recommendations for the development of said territory, including among other things, the general location, character and extent of streets, viaducts, subways, bridges, waterways, waterfronts, boulevards, parkways, playgrounds, open spaces, the general location of public buildings and other public terminals, whether publicly or privately owned or operated. For water, light, sanitation, transportation, communication, power and other purposes, as well as include a zoning plan for the control of height area bulk location and use of private buildings and premises. This isn't that sort of a statement to be sure a rational planning statement, and we could critique that, but about what planning covers, far more than zoning. In addition, planning considers non-zoning mechanisms to implement the plan. I just mentioned that the zoning plan was just one thing as part of planning, but capital budgets for infrastructure spending, tax laws, environmental laws are just part of the implementation tools for planning and plans, zoning is only one. Another reason for the separation, a second is at its best, planning is more inclusive and democratic than zoning. The process behind zoning actions tends toward the transactional and instrumental, often a variant of rent seeking activity, dominated by the usual suspects. By being less consequential, less locked into the outcome, less susceptible to rent seeking, planning tends to mitigate the interests of the powerful and allows the voices of others to be heard. Now, to be sure we have a lot of work to do, still with regard to making public participation more than just a two word phrase, starting with two P's. The third of the fourth reasons for separation is that planning legalizes zoning by allowing judges to measure its infringements upon individuals with regard to property rights and some other individual rights against a separate process and product. And that makes judges far more comfortable in approving zoning. Indeed, the standard constitutional test for reviewing garden variety zoning is asking whether the zoning is clearly arbitrary and unreasonable, having no substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals, and general welfare. And judges and courts are much more comfortable if they can measure zoning actions against a plan that was enacted at another time to ensure that it's not arbitrary and capricious. Now, I will note that in reality, and judges do deal with reality, given the fact that many cities and towns across the country over time stopped enacting a separate plan. And indeed, there were critiques of the so-called static comprehensive plan. Judges, ever innovative, came up with this fantastic idea, which is that zoning itself, the zoning map itself was the plan. So guess what? Axiomatically, it was in accordance with itself. But that, of course, undercut this basic notion of measuring zoning against something separate. The fourth and final reason to support the separation between planning and zoning is that planning is more speculative, at least the best planning. It's not locked into outcomes and ready to be implemented. It can look years into the future, set broader goals, imagine physical outcomes that are not fully realistic or ready for prime time. In short, when we plan rather than zone, we think much larger. We're not restricted by zoning's toolkit with its various strengths and limitations. And if we are to debate the merits of density, for example, then let's frame that debate in planning rather than zoning terms and make sure that more than zoning aficionados and experts participate in that debate. I've been caught saying on more than one occasion to plan is human to implement divine. However, let me be very, very clear about that. Divinity is loftier than zoning. The second of my six propositions. Zoning is reinventable and it always has been. There have been lots of evolutions since the days of traditional Euclidean zoning. And the list is very, very long, particularly commencing in the 1950s with planned unit developments and cluster zoning and mixed use districts and special permits and incentive zoning and Ramaphosa style growth management laws and special districts and transfer of development rights and inclusionary zoning. Now, to be sure, there has been resistance to change and single family districts, which Sonia Hurt in her recent excellent book Zoned in the USA, named of course after Bruce Springsteen's song, Sonia assured me that was her whole intent. So, Sonia, I've outed you. She has documented this peculiarly American preoccupation with single family residential. And that continues and is path dependency particularly in the suburbs. And there are still some who would argue that to this day zoning should do more than keep the pig out of the parlor and institutionalized extension, in other words of nuisance law ideas. But that remit expired long ago. And I've mentioned some of the things, PUDs and cluster zoning, but the more recent expansions of zoning demonstrate its reinventability. Social zoning, for example, to deal with social as well as physical outcomes, it's always been there but now it's blatantly and expressly there with an inclusionary zoning, linkage, incentive zoning and exactions for affordable housing, daycare centers and cultural facilities. Developers claim that it's asking for too much and they substitute the word extortion for exactions but it's very, very much part of the practice of zoning today. And the courts get involved by reviewing whether or not this is fair, but it's simply an accepted part of the practice of zoning, social zoning. Form based zoning with its roots in the morphological ideas of people like Colin Rowe and Aldo Rossi pushed forward by the new urbanists and out of their traditional neighborhood development ordinances. But what makes form based zoning so interesting is that it places full faith and credit in shape restrictions alone to fashion the desired city. In zoning terms, the envelope itself rather than what's in it gets all the attention in a way function follows form. And cities across the country with Miami, Milwaukee, Denver and others claim to have form based codes. If you actually look at them, they don't simply deal with the shape restrictions of the zoning. They do control to some degree use but they put special focus on form. But we could do a thought experiment. What if we really did get rid of use restrictions entirely and simply rely on shape restrictions with regard to zoning? Should mixed use in short dictated by the market become the default position? To be sure, controlling form does end up controlling to some degree use. You can't have a factory that requires horizontality in a hundred story skyscrapers. So form does have some relation to use but it's interesting to imagine getting rid of one of the three or two of the three key tools of zoning which is use controls, shape controls and bulk or density or intensity controls. What if we got rid of two and just had the violin or the viola of shape? Others, by the way, argue for strengthening use restrictions. Maybe we just should have use based zoning and get rid of form controls and manufacturing districts that are exclusive use districts push a little bit in that direction. Another reinvention, design based zoning. Zoning that's focused on specific prescriptive design outcomes. It will not surprise everyone, particularly architects, to recognize that not everybody agrees with such design specificity and prescription creep. The argument being that it stifles creativity and expression but it's very much part of zoning practice today. So for example, design review discretionary zoning where proposed development must be compatible or contextual or harmonious with or consistent with the physical characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood or the surrounding area or the surrounding district with reference to architectural style, materials, facade treatments, colors, proportions, scale, setbacks, height, massing, roof lines, building tops, cornice lines, ornamentation, fenestration and the list goes on and on. San Francisco had a beauty contest. That's what it was called around these sorts of things. Former New York City Planning Chair, Joe Rose, proposed zoning relaxations in return for good design. The previous city planning commission chair and more famously Columbia Urban Planning graduate, Amanda Burden, made good design a hallmark, a celebrated part of her legacy. Some of her design requests were even deemed a mandatory, meant by the way in a good-natured way, maybe less good-natured, sometimes people would talk about demanda, but they were all about design in terms of architecture. By the way, design-based zoning can also be as of right and rule-based. For example, in Jerusalem, building in a certain kind of stone with a certain kind of color, brick in certain parts of Boston, faux adobe in Santa Fe, these are all implemented through legal strategies. And then there's viewshed and skyline zoning, where would St. Paul's Cathedral be? Were it to be surrounded by the high-rises that are popping up in London? So indeed, there are legally protected areas or viewsheds for design. New York City has certain skyline protection or viewshed districts, and indeed, in practice, disapproved Jean Nouvel's proposals for the Museum of Modern Art Tower initially, as well as a tower that was gonna be built near the Empire State Building to protect the skyline. A final reinvention, which I think needs to get a lot more play, is performance-based zoning. And it is the new frontier and very interesting. What if zoning, instead of setting forth specific rules with regard to use and shape and bulk and all of its mediating language, instead described ultimate outcomes without that mediating language, imagine a standard in zoning demanding that whatever development occurs, it must be productive, equitable, sustainable, livable, and interesting. And that's the standard. Now that would be, of course, quite a performance. That's in part why it would be called and is called performance zoning. But I would argue with all of the challenges that that raises, that it is the very idea of being so direct about what we seek that makes the performance zoning approach worthy of further exploration. And believe me, there are great thesis topics embedded in that idea. The third of my six propositions, zoning is for sale. There's no two ways about it. Cities are selling zoning to obtain public benefits. And quite frankly, they've been doing so for decades. Some people like to call this value capture. I like to call it value sharing because the phrase acknowledges that this is very, very much a two-way street. New York City pioneered, in most reckonings, zoning for sale. Incentive zoning introduced in 1961 for privately owned public spaces of plazas and arcades. It's been expanded to legitimate theaters and all sorts of other public benefits. Most recently, with regard to Vanderbilt Avenue, the SL Green Building right next to Grand Central Terminal, and even with proposed East Midtown zoning that hasn't been adopted yet, that's selling zoning for infrastructure improvements in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, this is not only old news in the United States, but it's old news, even older news internationally. If you look at the 1942 UTHWAT Expert Committee on Compensation and Betterment Report, it talked about use value and exchange value and floating value. And the idea that all of these rights actually had value to everybody and could be exchanged. In the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act coming out of the UTHWAT Report, there was actual introduction of what's called planning gain as well as betterment ideas. Planning gain being things that could be secured in return for effectively giving development rights which were of value to owners. Sampalo has introduced in recent years so-called certificates of additional construction potential bonds, so-called CPACs, after downzoning parts of the city to a one floor area ratio. So you downzone and then you sell development rights and then you use that money for other sorts of things. And this kind of financing strategy will become more and more popular. Don Haigman and Dean Majinski wrote a wonderful book in 1977 called Wind Falls for Wipeouts which maps out this terrain of selling zoning. So, if it's been used so much and for decades and decades, what's the problem? Here it is, does zoning for sale pull the curtain too far back and undercut the foundational idea that cities set FARs and other rules on the basis of planning ideas independent of whether the city earns money by allowing more development? Does zoning for sale in short sacrifice good physical planning on the altar of cash for other public benefits? Now many people look at the mandatory inclusionary housing program that's been talked about and is being implemented here in New York as raising this issue, at least to the extent that it is tethered to neighborhood upzonings. But that's after all what pays for affordable housing. The big question then is, is reliance on this essentially neoliberal approach undermining society's willingness to actually pay for public benefits the old fashioned way with tax dollars? And do we ultimately get public benefits that are in some ways less public? Is a privately owned public space as public as a publicly owned public space? In any event, if we are to sell zoning and we are doing it, I would argue we need to do it much more smartly. Are the incentives that are being given to private developers such as floor area bonuses necessary, sufficient, but not excessive to secure private sector willingness to provide these public benefits? Are the public benefits often managed by private actors provided as promised over time? And I can tell you that in many cases, they are not, whether it's affordable housing that in the twilight, the dim mists of memories suddenly are occupied by people who are not families who when they pay 30% of their incomes are classified in the low and moderate income category. Or public spaces here or in Seoul, South Korea, which at one time everybody knew or thought they knew that they were a public space, but all of a sudden they have restaurants and sales kiosks selling t-shirts and, you know, presidency election material which were, by the way, removed to sales kiosks removed from Trump Tower over the past year and a required public bench 22 feet long was reinstalled after about 15 years thanks to the efforts of a number of dedicated people. I was there this morning at eight o'clock, by the way, the public bench is now being happily used by the media as they watch people go in and out of Trump Tower at elevators, but at least it's being used by the public and I think actually it becomes a public space for America and the world for the moment, although at a certain point I want that bench return just to the people. Do we, in short, get something less public here and that's the big question. By the way, zoning for sale programs can undercut other kinds of zoning programs, transfer of development rights once there's a competition there. And then there are areas that don't have the market demand for buying zoning. If developers don't want to buy more zoning then they're also not going to provide the public benefits that they're being given an incentive to provide. So what about core areas where no one actually wants to build to begin with? How do certain poor areas get public spaces if there's no market demand for the towers, the neoliberal approach that would actually promote these? Fourth of my six propositions. Zoning should revisit privileging of neighbors. This is actually quite controversial. The history of zoning has always been about privileging neighbors. If you look back to the 1920s, zoning amendments and variances when they would be adopted or given always gave neighbors, that is to say people nearby the action, preferential notice and sometimes voting requirements. If a certain number of neighbors objected there might be a super majority vote required in order to enact the change. Coupled with the political structure of local district representation, the idea of neighborhood privilege is reinforced. There is great deference given to district counselors sometimes in law, sometimes by practice and we hear about Aldermanic hold in Chicago or Councilmanic prerogatives in Philadelphia in which local rather than at-large district counselors actually have power effectively to veto projects within their district. Some have referred to the iron triangle of land use regulation. The applicant proposes, the neighborhood opposes and the government disposes. Well on the government disposes if it's the local district representative you've got an issue of a challenge between local interests versus citywide interests. It is valid it seems to me to ask whether this sort of preference too often undercuts good planning and social outcomes that serve citywide interests that may be unattainable if the neighborhood fights and for example fights against density so it's density versus affordable housing. And this is a big issue even the White House Council of Economic Advisers recently recognized how important local land use regulations and the way they're administered in particular zoning is. Now let me be clear because I like wandering around New York and going to neighborhoods and I still want to be able to continue to do that. Neighborhood concerns do matter and sometimes NIMBY is not simply parochialism and you can read John Costonis' superb book Icons and Aliens addressing the issue of disruption through neighborhood change. Neighborhood character does matter, it does exist, gentrification does occur and so there are legitimate issues to be sure to be addressed through neighborhood control but there may be better ways of addressing neighborhood concerns that allow for more of a balance. To be sure benefits and burdens need to be distributed equally around the city. New York has its charter based fair share law that could be expanded. I think situating the discussion of benefits and burdens in a planning context outside of the immediacy of any given decision can allow neighborhoods to hear about what they will get beneficially as well as what burdens they may be asked to bear. Community benefits agreements have been touted by some as a solution, maybe they're part of the problem, we'll have to see. Now by the way, this is a scale problem in zoning that exists not only neighborhood to city but it exists city to region and city to state. So zoning should also, it seems to me, revisit the prerogatives afforded suburban areas as well as neighborhoods. I mean this is an odd kind of thing. It is assumed that cities and towns and villages have their power to zone. Well zoning is actually virtually in all across the United States a state not a local power. To be sure there are home rule states but it is a state power and states give to localities the ability to do what they do. States could require that cities and towns take account of regions and in fact if you look at a lot of state zoning acts it talks about the region and we're there to be more aggressive state legislatures. You could have much more of a regional approach to zoning. You could also have more robust intrusive some would say radical reliance on state constitutions going beyond Mount Laurel which in New Jersey became the poster child of a state constitutional case that required New Jersey suburbs to have their fair share of housing for low and moderate income people and I just actually wrote a short article in the architecture Boston Journal arguing that somebody should go to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court claiming that they wanna move into one of the suburbs around Boston and they've been prevented from doing so because of local zoning and that it violates their state constitutional rights not the national constitutional rights. Again it doesn't allow me to travel around the suburbs of Boston very easily either. The fifth of my six propositions zoning should be transparent and comprehensible in order to be democratic and equal. Does anyone really know what's in their local zoning? Does anyone really understand it? And the answer is no except for a very small segment of society zoning is too often like the internal revenue code in the United States written in a foreign language by the way by planners as well as by lawyers decipherable only to these specialists and maybe that is the plan. I don't think so. I just think it's poor draftsmanship and a lack of interest and concern about making it transparent and comprehensible. Does New York City's zoning resolution really need to be thousands of pages? It's actually written and distributes on a periodic basis a guidebook a guidebook to the zoning resolution that's also 80 or 90 pages to explain all of this stuff with a glossary. I think that's great but it begs the question why not make the actual zoning better that way? So there are three steps to rectify this I think better drafting of existing ordinances using graphics by the way to make clear to individuals online what a proposed zoning change will mean to them. And part of this finally is to daylight what I call dark zoning. That's the zoning of discretionary actions special permits, variances, department of buildings decisions that really implement what the zoning text and maps on their face say, but end up zoning the city. And three wonderful PhD students Bernadette, Lauren and Valerie have written this wonderful working paper on variances and special permits given by the Board of Standards and appeals here in New York that daylight, the planning and effectively de facto zoning impact and even de jure zoning impact these discretionary decisions can have. My sixth and final point. Zoning should be taught in design schools. And the Dean made that very, very clear. I said I had six propositions. I actually, she has given me a seventh proposition which I'll always use in the future and quote her which is zoning is quite sexy. You all heard it, I heard it, it's on video and I think she's absolutely right. I wrote an article called Why Implementation Matters in the Harvard Design Magazine a couple of years ago and I made the argument both at my school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design but in general that really implementation which is law, finance and politics needs to be taught as part of the design and planning curriculum in a much more robust way than it has been. It shouldn't be a stepchild and thesis projects and studios and research are dying for this kind of thing. And here's the key point. The students will love it. In other words, this is not eat your spinach kind of recommendation. They actually will have a great time with it. Once they engage with it and one hears that when people actually get into zoning my God, I didn't realize it was so interesting but beyond that it's actually what shapes the built environment and why wouldn't one as a design or planning student or scholar or practitioner want to be involved in shaping at a wholesale level rather than building by building retail level the entire built environment and for better and worse that's what zoning and these other implementation tools actually do so that within an architecture firm eventually this is my hope and dream zoning won't be the backwater job that doesn't lead to promotion which is what Tom Main mentioned out loud at a previous zoning conference five years ago when we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of New York City's 1961 zoning resolution. Ask Michael Sorkin in his book Local Code or look at the issue of Perspecta on Codes from Yale. These are exciting moments and there could be a lot more excitement. So let me conclude. Winston Churchill said in a speech to the British House of Commons, quote, we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us unquote. We want a built environment that is productive, equitable, resilient, livable and beautiful. Does zoning get us there? Are there superior regulatory mechanisms to achieve the goals that society seeks to achieve or do we just need to improve zoning? I stand with better zoning. I'm a realist. There's lots of work to be done. Lots of zoning ordinances to be repaired and believe me, this is not like the Maytag Repairman. The zoning repairman or woman is proactively studying and revealing and critiquing and speculating and finally improving the armature of law that we have. Zoning is in a way like a thermostat. It is up to citizens, their political representatives and the planning advisors to argue about the right temperature and then to set the temperature thermostat to achieve that temperature. But let's make sure that the thermostat, if that's what zoning is, that we are using is creatively crafted and correctly calibrated to measure and implement our dreams for our cities. Thank you very much. Well, as I mentioned, Sonia Curtis and a King of South, followed by Andrew Whitmore, and I think you're the island, who will get right into today's contract. So Sonia, please. All right. Well, thank you for having me. I feel very honored to be here. And I do realize that I only have 10 minutes, so I'm only going to follow one thread in the history of zoning or how it began. So I'll only talk about one subject that Gerald mentioned, which is the prevalence of the single family use zone, which indeed is the most dominant land use in American cities, towns and suburbs. And this is even true for the New York Metro region. So what I'd like to talk to you about is how this idea, which has become extremely familiar to us, actually was developed. And my main point is that what is familiar is actually not that shouldn't be that familiar, that if we study the history of it, we understand the extent to which it was actually a rather revolutionary concept. And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I will let you judge on your own. So I want to start with a quote. Gerald again referred to Euclid versus Ammler and everyone knows this story, so I won't go in detail. But the point was that at the time, a definition was provided. It wasn't the first definition. It was building on many definitions that were already around the planning and architectural discourse, that indeed, a detached house is so important. It's so important to American citizenship that actually it deserves to be legally enshrined in municipal zoning code. So this is quite different than simply having single family homes. Well, everyone can have them. They exist in any part of the world and depend how you define them. The point here is not that it just exists in physical reality, but actually that this is a legal construct and when you put it on the map, nothing else could be built. And my claim here, and this is just an illustration from a city in Texas, this kind of a map is extremely familiar to us. And everyone knows what's the yellow. And you can find cities, towns and suburbs in the country that are colored in this particular way. Sometimes it's in green, you know, other colors. But the point is that over 50% of this particular city and in suburbs this goes commonly to 90% is indeed still zoned after so many years of critique for one particular purpose. So these are big cities relatively speaking. We are not talking about suburbs and you can see that one family zone, so areas where you mandate one thing and you cannot sell cookies, rent your second floor to your sister-in-law or whatever you wanna do, really comprise a very significant part of the share of the built environment by law. And my main point here is that this may seem very normal, familiar routine because we've done this for 100 years, but it actually was a very unique construct which was invented in the United States in the early 20th century. And my hope here is exactly to exchange the familiar. What seems familiar is actually a very interesting for good or bad idea and that's why we should critique it, we should exchange it in a sense. So Gerald here was speaking about Martians. So I want you to be Martians for a moment. What you really have come to be accustomed to actually can be estranged. So, and here's the way I'm gonna argue this. Zoning actually is a very old idea that somehow you have to regulate cities. I'm not going to be going to ancient Rome because time does not permit. But kind of the origin of modern zoning is often pointed to Germany. And this is actually the first time that the idea was kind of articulated clearly in a book by a particular German professor in 1876. So he actually proposed exactly this, that cities are divided in parts and by law, some things are permitted and some things are not permitted. Now it seems normal, but at the time was actually very revolutionary idea. But you can see that he never talked about single family homes that just didn't even occur to him. He thought that if you have a factory, the owners of the factory should be there, but also the workers of the factory because this way, obviously this is well before the car, especially in Germany, that that's how you live conveniently. So although very often we speak about Germany as being that place that zoning was invented, German maps from the time zoning maps actually does not designate like Americans do 20 or 30 years later, very clearly articulated single family zones. On the other side of that slide is actually the first, what's called the planning scheme, which is the equivalent more or less of zoning in England, Birmingham, 1913. I won't have time to go over the maps in detail. You probably can read the legend, which is in English. But again, it does not occur to the English in 1913 that detached homes deserve their own legal construct. So the way the English actually did it at the time, this is Sheffield, this is the third planning scheme. In England, see they did like 20 houses per acre or 24 houses per acre. And then they would say, and in no building could more than eight houses be placed without a break so that the next building would start. So again, this is something that just did not occur to them. And I claim it's an American invention. As a matter of fact, British experts traveling to the United States were saying, look at the Americas, what an interesting idea. How come we the British did not come with this? So that's my point. This is unique, it was revolutionary, it was an invention. And in some of my research, I actually read early zoning brochures but also the transcripts of the planning conferences from that period, the architectural conferences. And then I read a lot of the architectural form. So what you're seeing, the images are actually not necessarily from zoning or planning documents. A lot of them come from architecture. So my point is that from a very early point in the 20th century, dichotomy was established in American architectural and planning discourse, which positioned the detached home as its own category. It was a different kind of human habitat than the single family district. And through these discourses, it's argued over and over and over again in architectural journals, planning journals, conferences, early zoning brochures that, if you have a detached home next to a row housing or multifamily housing, it's a problem. They're just not normal. It shouldn't be done this way. There's something wrong with this and we have to improve the built environment by separating them. So this is an example of harmonious development. And you can kind of guess by this shady, it's a little, not perfectly clear slide because it's very old, but in one block, there are more multifamily houses in another, there are single family houses. So they're still nearby because it's the early 20th century but this is an example of harmonious development. This is how the environment should actually be developed. So this is a very powerful argument that was developed at the time and it was extremely well, I think, articulated. Why were they articulating this? One side, there was a very strong argument that we do this to protect property values. I will not be actually reading the quotes for you because they're pretty brief. I think you can read them pretty quickly. The point is that if you have a nice district of single family homes, a multifamily home, even if it's an upscale multifamily home, actually tends to ruin values. So this was one of the most important ways in which this was articulated. No one is going to be surprised that there is a lot of talk about race. Everyone knows there was racial zoning in a number of southern cities. And as a matter of fact, when this becomes an illegitimate practice according to the, I mean, really 1918, Gerald can correct me on the year. Sorry. This is actually happening in Baltimore. They say, okay, so we won't do this anymore. We won't have racial zoning. I can achieve the same effect just by calling certain areas single family and other areas multifamily homes just as well with the same effect. And of course, there was a lot of talk about class separation, that you could position the different kinds of classes in separate places. This is actually for the common good. It's for everyone's betterment. So Robert Whitten worked in New York. He did a zoning ordinance for Atlanta and many other cities. So as he sees it, the clerks live here, the bankers here, the workers here, and this is good for all of society because this is in essence how we promote class peace. So I would also say this, that this however, in my opinion, and it's somewhat I deviate from the literature was not just about class and race. And there's also about gender, but I won't have time. But there was a very, in my opinion, sincere belief that the detached home is really a superior way of living. And even if you have a beautiful or innate, very expensive multifamily building, after all, it's just a tenement house. So there was this kind of dream that this is a better way of living and the poor eventually somehow in the future could live in single family homes themselves. So there was a strong belief in the superiority of that particular built form, regardless or in addition to class and race. So very quickly I'll go through how this story was argued. And my argument is that they really told a good story. There's a lot of storytelling and planning and that's a good one. And if you actually read the discourses, there is a plot, there is a protagonist and there is a perspective. So in every story, half Hollywood movies, there is a beautiful setting, the world is peaceful, then comes the villain, the situation is disrupted, there is conflict, climaxes somehow, the hero reacts, and then there is a resolution. And I think that this is generally how the story was argued. You start with an original beautiful state of single family homes. Those people come in these tall buildings, they squeeze the single family home and then we resolve it through zoning. That was the resolution of how we solved this particular class conflict. I won't read this, but the point is that this is from a planning textbook. So the talk one actually explains this original setting, this paradise, which you know, imaginary paradise where people lived in single family homes and then they were invaded. They were taken advantage of, there was intrusion and all kinds of negative things are happening. And we eventually found zoning because we resolved this conflict through this method. So it's a good storyline. So I just took some terms from this literature and you can see when the multi-family building comes, blackmail, recitation, people have to evacuate. It's practically like a war. So this is a very powerful political story. Hey, we use it to this very day. And then the people who lived in the single family homes as the protagonist, this is the real Americans, homes of the people, the normal men. So there's a very strong populist moment in actually just explaining this original state and how it has to be defended. And then the invader, the alien children, the homes of multi-family buildings are children devouring their family distronged is a very, very strong term, terms. And again, my point is, this is a very powerful story. You may not like it, but it was told very persuasively. And so I just wanna end with this and then Gerald mentioned this. This is not a technical instrument. It seems technical and that's what I have to say and that's however, you can buy my book which really is called Family Theory in the USA or you can invite me to the 200th anniversary. Thank you. Yeah, because we can't see. Okay, great. Hi, thank you very much for having me here today. My name is Andrew Whitmore. I'm here from UNC Chapel Hill and over the last year and a half, I've been looking at the history of zoning decisions in Durham, North Carolina. I have been looking at zoning decisions related to heavy commercial and industrial uses but also residential uses going back to 1945. But today I'll mostly focus just on the residential uses as this is a panel about exclusionary effects. So I was really interested in this question of what role zoning has played in the racial segregation of the American city after the demise of explicit racial zoning with Buchanan versus Worley. Several southern cities actually were able to keep implementing it of Birmingham most notoriously until 1951, bucking the Supreme Court. But for the most part, the story of race becomes not as explicit as it was. And the mechanism of racial segregation maybe becomes more indirect as Ralph Pendle has written about. And then I was also interested to the extent that I did see maybe a traditional or a conventional way of treating more African American neighborhoods in Durham if political changes caused the zoning of those neighborhoods to change. Durham has experienced a lot of change over the last 70 years. It's always been a multi-racial city because it's a southern city even by 1910, a third of the population was African American. But there was not much African American representation, solid representation even until really the 1980s. So I've already talked about this a little bit, but the role of race is very clear when speaking about racial zoning. Baltimore was the first city to institute racial zoning in 1910. Several southern cities had it also, some even kept it into the 1940s or until 1951 in the case of Birmingham. And then the story of race gets a little bit sketchier and authors tend to talk about indirect mechanisms of segregation. It's a product maybe of class segregation, but not direct racial segregation. And this has been the challenge that the open suburbs movement faced in the 1970s. The Supreme Court said you really have to prove discriminatory intent, not just a discriminatory outcome is not really good enough to prove that there's been a violation of the equal protection clause. As Ralph Pendle said, land use controls are not signs that explicitly advertise whites only, even though that is an apparent effect often. So I was for today, I was looking really at exclusionary decisions. And these, I looked at two types of decisions that you might associate with exclusionary effects. One is down zoning from a higher density residential category to a lower density residential category. And also refusing to up zone, which after all is mostly what exclusionary zoning is because it's the refusal to intensify residential land use. So I considered the percentage of residents who were white and also the median income in the average census tracts where these actions happen. The dominant theory of zoning is the home voter hypothesis which says that zoning decisions are mostly driven by property interests. And so I kind of was operating with the hypothesis that I would see these decisions happening in higher income areas and also in wider areas. I considered qualitative evidence. I went back and in addition assembling a record of all these zoning decisions, I looked at hearing minutes from the zoning and planning commission from the council. I looked at contemporary plans and a variety of other primary materials. And what I did, I came up with, I did T tests of kind of the average census tract where these types of zoning decisions happen versus a city wide average census tract and also versus where residential upzonings happen. So comparing relatively opposite actions. And I divided the analysis at 1984 because that is kind of this moment, this watershed moment where you see a lot of African American representation in city council. There are a series of industrial accidents. There are a series of very high profile kind of housing violations. And all of a sudden the way in which zoning and planning is affecting black communities in Durham becomes very much a priority of city council. So this is before 1984 and the city on average is about 60% white where residential upzonings happen is just slightly more white, not significantly so. But where these exclusionary actions are happening is much more white. And what's very interesting is that you don't see these areas really being higher income which would be more consistent with the thesis that these actions are principally driven by homeowner, by property interests. In fact, what seems to be occurring is that in fact these actions are mostly clustered in lower income, relatively lower income white neighborhoods which might be the neighborhoods that are most accessible to African Americans, home buyers. After 1985 that discrepancy completely disappears on the looking at race. And then if you look over at income you actually see that these exclusionary actions are happening in much lower income neighborhoods which the qualitative evidence lends a lot of explanation to why these things are happening. So before 1985 the handling of both public housing projects and private sector, private apartment projects is very, very different in white and African American areas. I was expecting, this is back before the civil rights movement, I was expecting to see explicit language about not wanting particular kinds of people in their neighborhoods. I did not. I don't know why that is. I kind of wonder if after, well after Buchanan versus Worley, also after the Kramer case that overturned racial covenants if cities were very kind of conscious of racial prejudice driving these types of decisions as they kind of said to this stenographer, if someone says certain words, don't write that down. I don't know, but you do see a lot of euphemistic language, those people of course trespassing strangers, all the kinds of things that other authors have written about. And certainly, even though African Americans in their neighborhoods are saying we don't want these high density apartment projects, we don't want all this public housing here, it happens there. It doesn't happen in the white neighborhoods where these things are being proposed. After 1985, that kind of differential treatment of white and African American areas pretty much disappears. And in fact, you see that lower income neighborhoods really are the places where these exclusionary actions are happening. I think that's really a factor of two things which is an explicit policy, a planning policy of the city to de-concentrate low income housing, to redistribute low income housing into wealthier suburban areas. And so down zoning actually a lot of central city neighborhoods that have been affected by crime in the 1980s. And then there's kind of an ultimate decline in these actions altogether. And then the other thing of course is gentrification. A lot of lower income white neighborhoods, and now today black neighborhoods as well, pushing for downzoning to limit, to basically limit an influx of, or continue construction for low income residents. So these are the trends that I noticed and I'm basically arguing that historically anyway in Durham, when it was a very politically white dominated city, race was a factor in why these zoning decisions happen. So it kind of lends a narrative to, an empirical narrative to why, to the effect of zoning on racial segregation well after the demise of racial zoning. So that's my work and I've also done this project regarding heavy commercial and industrial uses and as well just looking at gentrification effects. So that's all, thank you. Hi, thank you for having me. So I'm gonna talk to you today about the city of Oakland. And in particular my area of research and teaching is in relationship to local government law and land use law. My background is I practice law for municipalities throughout the state of California for several years and then I co-founded a consulting firm that also provides strategic planning and community engagement services for some of those same municipalities. And I'm speaking to you today about Oakland because of the fact that what I wanna talk about is the relationship between historical discriminatory land use controls and the difficulty in actually changing spaces even when you do in fact update your zoning and or your planning. So in particular Oakland is a space that has been celebrated for its diversity. It is a space that in fact has had even accolades for its planning and its changes to increase density and improve sustainability through its changes to spaces in the downtown area. And in fact just from there you can see that it's celebrated for its food scene, its art scene, its cultural scene. It's also a space that the political representation represents the diversity that exists in that particular city. It is however also a city that has a very long history and profound history that has deeply impacted its current landscape still today. The image that I'm showing you is from America, it's captured in the book American Babylon which provides a very detailed record of decades and decades of discriminatory land use controls. This image in particular is a representation of the eminent domain power that was used by basically a consortium of agencies through redevelopment to raise houses in West Oakland changing the landscape of a historically African-American space in order to implement regional transportation networks. Those same regional transportation networks of course are also the areas today where there are priority development zones for planning purposes in order to accommodate all of the needs to address greenhouse gas emissions and to increase density and to bring people into the core of the space. But that particular use of land use control as well combined with all of the other discriminatory land use controls including redlining. This is a map that shows the historical redlining practices that show West Oakland and East Oakland all of the flatland neighborhoods being category D neighborhoods really deeply restricted the capacity for certain populations to live in different areas of the city. The reason I'm showing you this is because what follows of course is events, more current events this is a map that comes from Urban Strategy Council with respect to the foreclosure crisis which has deep relationship to where certain populations were allowed to live historically in Oakland. And you see again the foreclosure crisis was deeply felt in the flatland neighborhoods of West and East Oakland which is where primarily people of color have been able to live. And all of this is still reflected in where people live today. So despite the fact that it is a city of incredible diversity despite the fact that it is actually a city that today has a pretty nice balance of different demographic groups. The fact is when you look at Social Explorer for example you see that people still primarily live in the same neighborhoods that they were essentially forced to live in if you're a person of color in earlier decades. So what this map shows is that you have the sort of the green space on the top is where you have primarily white people living in those districts. And of course it's shaded to show the concentration of different groups. The green, the lime green represents African-American populations in West and East Oakland areas and that sort of deeper blueish-purple represents Latino community members. And so one of the issues that's at play though is of course the depth of color which you can't really effectively see here as well. And so I'm gonna show you another thing to really highlight exactly what has happened. This represents I think the true contrast of what exists in a space like Oakland where you have the yellow representing white residents that are still primarily concentrated in the Hills neighborhoods and then you have purple representing all people of color. And what is really important about this is that there are whole sections of the city where you have 90% of the census tracts primarily Latino and African-American. And that deeply impacts access to opportunity for residents in those areas. It also, sorry, it also has deep relationship of course to affordability within Oakland which is of course a major issue right now. One of the points of me sort of highlighting these different areas is all four of these points are in areas where you have substantial multi-family dwellings. You also have, these are all areas that encourage that type of development. You can see at the top you have real disparity and median incomes within Oakland in terms of the disparity of basically life outcomes. We have as far back as 2008 the county health department producer report that explained that an African-American youth in West or East Oakland would likely live 15 years less than their white counterpart born in the Hills. And you can see of course that the relationship between affordable, these are by the way, these are examples of a single bedroom, small space in those areas is still felt. So why does all of this matter today in terms of this context? One of the things I wanna highlight are the limitations that the state still applies. State law still applies to the capacity for the city of Oakland to actually resolve some of these issues. So in particular, one of the things that you think about if you were to try to address these injustices is you would wanna think about affordability, you would wanna think about mobility within the jurisdiction, the capacity to actually move into neighborhoods that have better schools and the capacity to be able to stay in place. I've highlighted some of the important areas of state law that have limited the capacity for the jurisdiction to do things. Coastal Hawkins is a very dominant one. It completely eliminates the capacity for true rent control without vacancy control. Any landlord can reset the rate of a unit, the minute is vacant. Also, it includes all single family dwellings and condominiums, which has a huge relationship to the capacity to even implement rent stabilization on certain rentals. A really important one too in relationship to the foreclosure crisis was 2005, the American Financial Services case. In 2001, the city attempted to put forward an ordinance that would have attached more liability to basically predatory lenders. And specifically, it actually attached liability to the secondary market that bundled and purchased predatory loans. And it also required demonstration or proof that individuals that were borrowing in this way had gone through credit counseling. And this was because the city understood that there was a real risk of a major foreclosure crisis in the Flatland neighborhoods. And yet in 2005, the Supreme Court in California basically said that it was preempted by state legislation and struck the ordinance down. Palmer is also really important. Oakland has had some controversy about whether or not it would put forward an inclusionary zoning ordinance since the early 2000s. And the fact is is even if they wanted to, with respect to rental dwellings, they wouldn't be able to under the current state of law. Palmer was a second district court of appeal opinion that really shaped the capacity for jurisdiction throughout the state to move forward with inclusionary zoning for rental dwellings. And there was an attempt even by the state legislature to basically overturn that. It was vetoed by Governor Brown in 2013. So on the positive, however, there is absolutely political will in this space to try to address these issues. And so I highlight two of the local measures, the local ballot measures that were passed most recently to try to address these particular issues. You see Measure KK, which is bond financing critical in the climate of California, which is impacted by Proposition 13 to create a source of revenue for infrastructure improvements that will also have an equity agenda attached to the decisions of where those infrastructure improvements would go, as well as increasing affordable housing development. And secondly is Measure JJ, which expands just cause eviction throughout the jurisdiction to more properties. And what I wanted to also highlight is the critical role of the planning profession, actually allowing these to move forward. They are both outcomes that are deeply connected to a document Oakland at home that was led by planning professionals. So that concludes what I wanted to say about Oakland, but in general I wanted to just highlight the critical relationship between local and state law and trying to create solutions to these issues. Graphically the least, that's for sure. Oh dear, and the font got screwed up. All right. Oh really? Yeah, it's okay, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. So, okay, great, terrific. So I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me and for organizing this exciting day. I'm gonna talk about current zoning. And I think I'm gonna focus on Gerald. I think your fourth proposition, maybe it was your third, about zoning as protecting neighborhood interests. And I wanna basically argue that, I will argue that exclusionary zoning is alive and well and there's evidence that it's actually growing in intensity and it may be sort of diffusing to larger urban areas as well. I am not an economist, but I'm probably the closest thing you're gonna see to an economist today. So I'll play one on TV and I will represent as Gerald said the cottage industry highlighting some of the costs of zoning and that's not to say that there aren't, that zoning doesn't have a lot of benefits as well but there are many reasons I think to believe that it is excessive in many localities and that it protects the interests, local interests at the expense of more collective interests. And so what is exclusionary zoning? I just went on to the internet and looked at Mary and Webster to find that its residential zoning plan is requirements at the effect of excluding low income residents. Really to some extent all residential zoning are much residential zoning. Any residential zoning that sort of controls the density, restricts the density is gonna be of a plot is gonna be exclusionary in this sense. I had the same quote from Euclid Bambler so I'll skip over that. What about the prevalence of exclusionary zoning? There's little direct evidence actually in sort of what the shifts in. It's very difficult to sort of collect. I mean it's just the kind of detailed work that you would need to do the evidence to try to figure out whether or not zoning ordinances are becoming more exclusionary. But there's a lot of indirect evidence that suggests that zoning has become more restrictive since the 1970s. This is from a recent paper by Pierre Genang and Danny Shoag where they basically use as a proxy for restrictive zoning the number of state land use cases that I mean state legal cases that mentioned the word land use and you can see that it sort of sharply increases after 1970. Similarly, you've probably seen some version of this diagram many times and but this shows, this is from Joe Jerko and Raven Malloy's paper and it shows this really sharp divergence between the construction cost of a house and what a house actually, so what a house costs to build and what a house costs to actually buy and that suggests that increasingly there's sort of a growing, people are paying an increasing price over time for a develop plot of land. That may be, some of that may be due to actually geographical restrictions and diminishing supply of land but there's a lot of evidence that suggests that this is also about man-made restrictions and about regulatory restrictions. We also have some evidence from Jenny Schutts and some colleagues that have done a lot of work collecting detailed regulations, zoning regulations in Massachusetts and show this sort of uptick in regulations in Massachusetts and jurisdictions around Boston and there are a growing number of land use experts and economists that are arguing sort of that there's a new exclusionary zoning now that is coming to large cities and that we're seeing it in the form of historic districts whoops and for instance and downzonings and for instance the, what is that, the LA initiative, the initiative for neighborhood integrity or something and that's gonna be on the ballot in Los Angeles and in March that places really pretty strict limitations on new development in LA. This shows the growth of historic districts, it's one small but albeit very controversial example from here in New York City, whether this is exclusionary zoning or not, it certainly is, we're certainly seeing a steady growth in the number of parcels that are protected by historic districts over time in New York. So what are the impacts of this segregation, impacts of this sorry, impacts of this exclusionary zoning and this sort of growth in exclusionary zoning on segregation and on house prices and it's difficult to actually test that because you know that sort of the jurisdictions that adopt more restrictive zoning ordinance that they're gonna be systematically different from those that don't so any differences in development patterns that's hard to actually attribute those specifically to the zoning itself but there's certainly, that doesn't mean there hasn't been a lot of people that have tried and I'm just gonna, in the interest of time I'm just gonna sort of give you the quick tour of what sort of the economic and planning research says on this and in terms of looking at racial segregation within regions, there's limited evidence, limited empirical evidence but what exists suggests a link between stricter density regulations and greater racial segregation, perhaps not surprisingly. There's mixed evidence when you look at economic segregation within regions, there's mixed evidence on the impact of exclusionary zoning perhaps surprisingly on poverty concentration but land use restrictions do, are more strongly associated with greater concentration of the or segregation of the wealthy. In terms of one thing that we're, that there's more recent research that suggests that tighter land use regulations seem to be leading to greater economic segregation across regions so that you're seeing this greater diversion between sort of the coastal expensive cities and lower cost cities in terms of who is able to access those environments and in terms of there's lots more evidence on impacts on development patterns and house prices generally that as restrictiveness of land use rises development activity declines and price and rents rise, not surprisingly it's sort of simple econ 101 would tell you. This just is one figure I pulled out to just show that the shows that sort of as zoning becomes more restrictive as measured by this Wharton, this is now famous Wharton land use regulatory index that cities become less affordable on the affordability index. So, and there's also new evidence that suggests that restrictive land use regulations are not only sort of heightening segregation and increasing prices but they're actually maybe hindering overall national economic growth through basically blocking people from freely moving into high growth areas. And so in the end, I mean, I think there is a fair amount of evidence that the exclusionary zoning is imposing these costs and it's imposing these sort of aggregate costs, right? And the problem is, and Gerald really and others have sort of highlighted this that it is that these zoning ordinances have these concentrated benefits, right? That individual localities or neighborhoods that enact these zoning ordinances may see benefits from those and those are very concentrated interests that want these ordinances. At the same time, those ordinance may be imposing very diffuse costs on a large number of people, right? And then it's a classic collective action problem, right? Very, very difficult sort of a prisoner's dilemma, if you will, right, that we've got and it means that we're likely to have too much zoning. Okay, so what do we do about it? Very difficult challenge here. Again, because of this collective action problem, hard to imagine localities are gonna be too excited about doing too much to remove the zoning that they hold dear to their heart. But there are a couple sort of procedural reforms that I think are interesting that people have proposed, Rick Hills and David Schleicher have proposed annual growth targets or zoning budget and essentially what that says is that cities have to sort of collectively agree on a certain amount of growth per year. If they don't reach that target, no downzoning's are gonna be permitted. Once they've reached that target, they're sort of a zoning budget, right? That they can spread around. Brian McCabe and I suggested something sort of related, a housing impact statement where every new regulation would have to basically a city planning commission would have to actually analyze what the actual impact of that regulation is gonna be on reducing the developmental square feet of residential space. And then that can be weighed against the benefits of that regulation. David Schleicher proposed tax increment local transfers, which would actually sort of public finance mechanism that would allow basically the tax increment revenues that come from new development to basically be distributed back to the neighborhood that is being affected by that development. So those are all at the local level, okay? Very difficult again for political reasons to imagine. Too much is gonna be done at the local level as Gerald explained already, right? States actually have really controlled the, they have a lot of authority over zoning and over local governments altogether. You know, that said, it's sort of this, so it's gonna be, it's politically challenging for states to do too much. So I have some suggestions that I think are politically feasible. One is sort of a set of carrots that states could, and this is sort of like Massachusetts 40R for those of you that know it, that rewarding localities that encourage new construction with state support to basically aid the development of any new needed infrastructure. Secondly, states could impose a set of rules. They could basically set minimum zoning requirements or prohibit specific provisions such as bans on multifamily housing. And they could have a set of sticks like Massachusetts 40B, but rather than targeting it to making the threshold be about affordable housing, maybe the state could reserve a right to overall local land use decisions in towns that have density levels below a certain level or issue a certain, you know, below a certain number of permits every year. I also wanna say, I think that the national government could do something. The Obama administration has been sort of flirting with this idea a little bit and not, you know, they have, you know, a $300 million proposal out there to talk about, they've issued some reports now. But, and I think there is some, there are some things that the national government could do as well. Actually legally the national government could do a lot, but politically it's gonna be difficult. The first they could introduce some kind of a race to the top for local governments that would perhaps, you know, set aside a special allocation of CDBG funding for local governments that agree to accept more density. They could reward states that adopt practices like Massachusetts has that discourage exclusionary zoning. They could require more reporting of, you know, it would be to sort of shine a light on what basic zoning practices are. It's amazing sort of how hidden all of this and how secretive and partially it is about the complexity. And I understand that, you know, this may be easier said than done. But, and then I do wanna end with, you know, sticks as well. I mean, you know, there are Justice Kennedy in his opinion in the inclusive communities case, which, you know, basically made, decided that that and reaffirmed that a disparate impact claims are cognizable under the Fair Housing Act. He really opened the door, I think, for fair housing challenges to exclusionary zoning specifically called out exclusionary zoning as the kind of ordinances that might have a disparate impact on minorities and serve, maybe not serve another compelling purpose. But, you know, to the extent that that may have had, you know, a question mark on November 7th that had, you know, has now hasn't even, or November 8th, that has an even larger, bolder question mark since November 9th. So, I think it's hard to imagine that we're gonna see that the judiciary is gonna be too friendly to those kind of challenges, but I think certainly it is something that we should keep in mind as well. So, thank you. Okay, good morning, everyone. I wanna thank the doctoral students for organizing this conference so far. It seems to be going smoothly. I think they've done a great job. So, we should commend them for that. And as a moderator, you know, I have a few questions I thought I would ask to start the ball rolling. One question, it's actually sort of two questions I wanted to pick up on Ingrid's point about the federal government's role. As Ingrid mentioned last year, the Supreme Court ruled that a disparate impact could be considered as related to fair housing issues, whereas previously, you know, it had been established that disparate impact could be applied to employment, for example. And so what that means is that housing policies that have an impact on protected classes or minorities could be reviewed for having a disparate impact, having a negative impact on those groups, and then it would be upon, beholden upon, come upon the local government or the state to defend that practice. So, my question follows up on what Ingrid said. She seems to be very pessimistic about the impact of that, but the election determined the presidency, not the judiciary, at least not yet. And so it would seem to be that it's still open question as to whether or not exclusionary zoning, which many of the other earlier presenters in Sisonia, Andrew have presented as being somewhat arbitrary. Is there an avenue for pursuing or opening up exclusionary areas that are exclusionary zoned using that tactic? And, you know, I'm familiar with a case that the NAACP filed against the town of Worcester Bay in the 1970s on that very logic. They ended up dropping it, but I think with that ruling, it does open that question. I saw it would be curious to hear if you think that's an avenue. I'm not aware of any cases that have been brought yet, but given your history that some of you have described, describing exclusionary zoning as being sometimes indirectly trying to target race, I'd be curious to hear what you think about that possibility. Do you want to go under your lawyer? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so there were a series of cases in the 1970s, like Arlington Heights outside of Chicago and in Blackjack, Missouri. I think were brought on equal protection grounds and they revolved around specific zoning actions. I think in both cases, what I was calling like refused upzonings. But, you know, the court basically said, well, we can't exactly determine that the intent was prejudicial. Which is actually the same thing that led to a lot of the laundry cases being upheld in California in the 1880s. There's this quote, you know, about not being able to peer into the hearts and minds of men and not knowing what their intentions were. But then when the Supreme Court finally looked at how often these ordinances were used against Chinese businesses versus white businesses, that's when it was finally overturned. So I think, you know, if we can look across a lot of cases, you know, and see that there's disparate impact across a lot of decisions, which is really what I was trying to do in my paper. I think before 1980s, 1984, in my research, you definitely see that there was a disparate impact on white and black communities. You know, that disappeared as the politics and the city changed. But, you know, I think if we look across policy over a long period of time and are able to prove, you know, statistically, which was actually one of the things that the Supreme Court brought up in Arlington Heights, that's, you know, statistical evidence of different treatment of neighborhoods over a period of time might be a premise refining prejudicial intent. You know, if we can do that, then maybe there is some more hope. But I don't, you know, an attorney could probably speak to this more. I know my kind of next step is to try and work on getting my work to a more legal audience, because I think this is an interesting point. I mean, oh, you should go first, because you're a lawyer, sorry. Oh, then also. I was actually gonna mention, though, that in states that have statutes and or Supreme Court opinions that have created fair share housing requirements, those are very quick vehicles to at least win on the element of getting a jurisdiction to rezone. The complicated issue, though, is unfortunate. For example, in California, housing element law is a very effective mechanism to require jurisdictions that have exclusionary zoning practices to have to correct to rezone. The issue, though, is it doesn't necessarily compel building of housing, right? It doesn't necessarily incentivize the building, either. So it could get the jurisdiction to rezone to eliminate the exclusionary zoning. It doesn't necessarily lead, though, to the adequate supply of housing. So that's still a pretty big issue. Yeah, I was just gonna say, and, you know, I'm not an economist, I'm not a lawyer, really, so. But I don't mean to be that pessimistic about it. I mean, I do think that I think there's some legitimate claims. I mean, and I think there's certainly some provisions, things like, you know, bans on single family, on multi-family housing, right? That as of right, multi-family housing. I mean, that, you know, you could prove statistically that that has a disparate impact. And so I do think that there's room there. I just don't know, and, you know, I think that you're right, that the courts are not gonna change, the courts are not gonna change tomorrow. But, you know, they're likely to change in a direction that it's gonna be less favorable to these kinds of claims. But again, but if you look at the inclusive communities, it's not only that the opinion reaffirmed, sort of, you know, the validity of disparate impact claims in the case of fair housing. But again, Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion specifically called out exclusionary zoning like three different times in the opinion. It's sort of, you know, as a way to say, like what we really, we're not sure about the facts in this case about the citing of the loan commousing tax credit. But if you know, if you have an exclusionary zoning ordinance, so, but the question is, is sort of in practice, right? Courts are also pretty deferential to local zoning. So I think that we certainly, certainly it can't be the only thing we can rely on. I do think we also have to push for these legislative, you know, these sort of state, probably at the state level they're gonna be, and as you talked about. Oh, what about the stick side of your policy description? You know, the federal government released the affirmative relief for fair housing guidelines last year. That's probably a little bit more up in the air. On the other hand, the policy did call for both racial de-concentration and poverty de-concentration, which would seem to speak directly to exclusionary zoning. So I guess we can assume either things will go as would have if the administrations, the parties did not change, or perhaps you would anticipate a draconian change or make more sort of status quo. But I'd be curious to hear if you think that that's also, could have been a viable mechanism? Could be or could have been a viable mechanism? I think it could have been a more viable mechanism and I think it could have been. I also think that they could have, I wish they would have actually required more explicit reporting of local land use regulations in the AFHs, which they didn't. But I do think the politics of this are interesting, right? Because on the one hand, you know, you would think that, you know, Republicans, more conservatives would not like regulations and be suspect of regulations. At the same time, they're also very protective of, you know, local government and state's rights. So I think it's interesting. I mean, certainly there's just been a tremendous amount of political hostility already towards the AFH rule and its implementation, even though frankly, I mean, it has very little teeth. And even that really just, you know, provoked a tremendously, you know, just a very strong response, so. I'll take some questions from the audience. Here's a question. In your view, how does exclusionary zoning rate in New York City? Does it wait? Is that what you said? Rate. Rate. I guess the question is, is New York City seen as being more exclusionary than other big cities, or that's exclusionary? I have to answer that. We're sorry. So, you know, I think that, I'm not really going to answer that question. I think I'm going to evade it. I will say that I do think there is something to this concern that we're seeing that exclusionary zoning is kind of diffusing into large cities, and you're seeing this in California cities, you're seeing this in New York, you're seeing this in a lot of coastal cities, and the motives are very different. I mean, I think the motives are really about protecting, in many cases, protecting low-income neighborhoods from displacement, but the irony is that to some extent, at least in the aggregate, the effects may be similar in restricting overall supply and increasing house prices. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think probably actually New York, maybe I will answer the question. I think if any, New York's probably, it's certainly been traditionally more open to development than a lot of other cities, but I do think we're getting, we're seeing quite a bit of pushback there. Yeah, I mean, as opposed to Los Angeles, where I used to live and work, in the 1970s and 80s, LA, I mean, zoning kind of creates an envelope on a site, but also over an entire city in terms of how many housing units that are allowed to be built there, and LA was initially zoned for something like 23 million people, and then it was gradually down zoned to something around, I think the estimates were at nine million in the 1970s, and then there was state legislation that specifically targeted charter cities over two million, AKA Los Angeles, that required them to down zone, and that took it down to four million, which is more or less where the city has been stuck today, but the planning department publishes maps that show where there's still capacity. Zoning isn't the only thing, and I think New York has been more open than California cities, but zoning isn't the only thing driving housing prices in these cities at all. You have this crazy international investment market in New York housing, and so zoning solution is not going to be a solution to the... And you have a restrictive, I mean, you do have restrictive geography as well. Right, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of factors. There are lots of factors. On those coastal cities, right. And looking at what jobs are created, and all these other things, so. Can I just have a real quick comment? I actually want to compliment Andrew that he's also doing research on commercial and industrial zoning. And I think that we, when we talk about inclusion rezoning, we always look at residential, but when I began doing my research, I was actually curious how it came to their minds that you can sell cookies in a residential district. And if you look at the discourses, the division between residential and commercial was also partially justified on exclusionary grounds, and you can find early 20th century language that, you know, if you have shops in residential areas, you know, that invites idle people who hang out around the corners and increase crime, or the other kind of a very obvious thing about industrial uses. Of course, zoning originally was very strongly argued for on public health grounds, although I didn't talk about it in my presentation, but think about it if you really care so much about public health, you'd prohibit people to live in the industrial zones, but that is actually not what happened in the early 20th century. You know, it happens actually just later. And it's that the industrial use thing is a quite a peculiar thing, and here is something that seems like a small point, but actually it's a very interesting point. In Germany at the time, and to this very day, the most restrictive areas of a town are the industrial areas. So if it's something that's heavy industrial, you try to limit residential because, you know, of public health reasons, but in the United States, it's the residential district that's traditionally most pure. I haven't quite answered this question to myself, but I'm just highlighting the point again that as much as I totally agree with the idea that, you know, race and class play a huge role in it, there is something American about it beyond race and class that space should somehow be pure. A single family home should be serene and private and so forth and so forth. And I think that at the very beginning, they could have achieved racial and class segregation potentially through other mechanisms. And the fact that they invented the single family zone really means they chose this instrument which was initially extremely legally controversial. And I think they chose it because for good or bad, single family residence really was perceived as the iconic way of living. So I think until we address for ourselves why is it so special, either intentionally or not intentionally, it would be leading to exclusion. What's interesting, so I mean, I'm sorry if I'm jumping in on this, but one of the things, I mean, your work really speaks to this very powerfully to this symbol of the importance and the value that we place in single family homes and the attached single family homes and owner occupied homes in particular. But I think that this sort of what we're seeing now, what I think is really different about this latest wave of sort of anti-development this movement is really it's coming from renters, right? And that's really what's making and that's sort of what's different about, I think what's going on in big cities now and certainly different about what's going on in New York. I mean, New York again, maybe one of the reasons, right? People have thought, well, it's more pro-growth because they're more renters, but now we're seeing this sort of inversion where even renters don't want development in their neighborhood. They want development overall, they understand that overall we want to expand the supply because we've got this affordable housing crisis, but not in my neighborhood. Yeah, I was going to add, you know, Rolf Pendall in the chain of exclusivity wrote about how, you know, in some cases, higher density can actually lead to gentrification effects really. And I think, you know, a lot of cities, if you look at say, San Francisco, which is just becoming more and more expensive, they're also allowing quite a lot relatively to the Bay Area to be built, but San Mateo County, nothing gets built there. So, you know, so development is looking bad in specific areas, but overall, you know, supply is still so limited in a lot of these metropolitan areas. You know, we don't know what a really, like a more liberal supply would look like because we're only seeing it in very specific areas where there's a lot of gentrification pressure and suburban areas, there's just no hope. Okay, so I'm going to ask one more question in the interest of time. And this one, it asks, how do we reconcile the desire for growth and inclusion and some of the performance measures discussed in Dr. Caden's panel, particularly his warning about the dangers of turning zoning bonuses into a market for or a source of cash? And, you know, I also had this question or sort of varying of this question, you know, it would allude it to this, but this notion of a budget, on the one hand, we have localities that, you know, like their quality of life or the morphology or what have you that they exist there, but there's a need to grow and what have you. So how do you, and do any of you have any ideas about how to balance that? Ingrid mentioned doing it, I guess a citywide budget over that kind of just kicks the problem upstairs to some extent, because the city still has to then decide how much it should grow. So any ideas on how we balance that tension between the local, perhaps more pro-cultural interests and the larger needs to accommodate growth and inclusion? Well, I think even in the context of the city that I was looking at, I think you have to balance the needs of the specific jurisdiction against the region as a whole, right? So I was discussing a city that's impacted by the fact that it's in a strong regional economy. And there is, and you know, my co-panels have just mentioned, for example, that there's no development in other spaces within that region. And so I think you have to look both at the needs of that space, that particular space, and then look at the region and have adequate coordination that takes into consideration the localized context. But when it comes, I think, to some of the financing mechanisms to achieve those goals, you also have to, again, look back to the jurisdictions, whether it's the states or the localities, because there are different mechanisms in place to even allow for payment of general services, let alone development of housing to accommodate the demands. Yeah, I mean, I would say sort of three things. I mean, one is that I do think that, you know, as I said, I think to some extent this is a classic problem. We've got spillovers, we should be kicking it up to a higher level of government. And so I think states should be asserting more control. In this case, I mean, again, easier said than done. I also think, you know, and I know the panel, the last panel of the day is gonna talk about inclusionary zoning, but I'm sort of okay. If we're paying for, you know, if we're asking developers to pay for greater density with affordable housing units, you know, that can help do and create integration. And I do think this idea of sort of tying on the financing side, again, maybe sort of taking some of those tax revenues, right, that whatever you're getting from that development, the incremental revenues and trying to sort of channel them back into the local area that feels put upon and by the new development, I think, there's also a promising strategy as well. So. Okay. Well, thank you, I think this is a great panel. I guess we're gonna have lunch now.